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The Next Step In Mobile? Circle Places Its Bet

Evan Reas and his Palo Alto-based company, Hawthorne Labs, have done a lot in the past three years:

After a marathon development period sweating through a New Delhi summer, vomiting through Dengue fever, launching a social site to help college students hook up with one another, taking cash from Ashton Kutcher and Marc Andreessen and setting up an appropriately grimy startup house in Palo Alto; the company is going all in with a mobile app that seems to solve a social networking problem that mega-players like GoogleGoogle, FacebookFacebook and Twitter have been itching to solve convincingly.

Circle– available on Android and iOS – is all about finding out where your friends and contacts are hanging out right now. After signing in through Facebook, Circle takes your friends and networks and places them on the app’s profile so that you can see where they are at any moment (unless they turn that function off, as is their choice at any time). Instant messaging…

What Reas and co-founders Shubham Mittal and Prassanna Sankaranarayanan have done is take some of the creepy factor out of divulging your location, injected a healthy dose of social and wrapped it up in a sleek, simple interface. Circle has racked up 4 million registered users so far (no, not just downloads), 3 million of which joined up since January.

Delhi Belly And An App That Helps You Flirt

Evan Reas, Circle CEO

While a student at Stanford University business school in 2009, Reas decided he was interested in pursuing technology that could connect people on a hyper-local level. “I’ve just been fascinated by people and what’s around us and the fact that there’s so much cool information around about the people and connections that are nearby but it’s not out there—we can’t see it, we don’t know it,” Reas told FORBES.

An early stab at solving the issue was the company’s first product, LikeALittle.com—a site that allowed college students to flirt with their fellow students anonymously. The potential for a viral breakout of the site was huge, Reas said, and he, Mittal and Sankaranarayanan on occasion would visit Stanford’s library, type up flirtatious messages to several students they saw there, post them on the site and then start handing out cards to those students urging them to visit the site, telling them that someone had written something about them.

“Then they’d come onto the site, they would see themselves – and I’d be watching this whole thing – and they’d be looking around the library, like, ‘Who wrote that? What’s going?’” At its zenith, the site operated in over 500 colleges and Hawthorne attracted $1 million from the likes of Andreessen Horowitz, Ashton Kutcher, and Yuri Milne, among others.

But before the trio of founders could launch LikeALittle, they had to overcome a serious issue—Mittal and Sankaranarayanan could not obtain a work visa and would need to return to their native India. Reas decided to go to South Asia with them to continue the development process in New Delhi for five months in mid 2010, living with Mittal’s family.

Shubham Mittal (image: Facebook)

“Startups are already difficult and then you take one and you put it in India and it becomes ten times more difficult,” said Reas. The infrastructure in place where the three cofounders were living forced them to deal with only part time internet connection, and a slow one at that. Temperatures would routinely reach 120F and air conditioning was rationed throughout the neighborhood. Meanwhile, the three were working on U.S. time, which meant pulling all nighters before crashing at dawn in a king-sized bed (yes, they all slept in the same bed) only to be awoken after an hour to have a morning cup of tea with the family before being allowed to grab a few more hours of sleep.

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